“A Chicken In Every Pot”

W. Hilditch

Active member
Everyone reading this knows how to cook a chicken in a pot, right? Probably not. First, clean the chicken. Remove the plastic bags and pieces from the neck and main cavities and rinse inside & out. Clean out all you can with your finger nails pulling loose pieces out of the cavity. Very important, clean out any blood along the backbone. There are two large pockets of blood toward the rear of the backbone that are covered with a membranes. Blood will leave the broth with a tart taste. Rinse well.

Choose a pot where the chicken will fit snuggly and you will be able to cover it with water with room to spare above. Todays chickens will probably need larger than a #8 Dutch oven which are normally 4 quarts. Add some water, then the chicken, then cover with water and add two or three tsp salt. You can always add more salt later.

Cover and bring to a boil. After boiling for a few minutes without the cover skim any foam off the top. Then cover, & turn the heat down. You want a slow rolling boil. If the top is spitting or clanging the heat is too high. A little steam release is what you want. Check periodically to see that the chicken is still covered in water with a rolling boil. Add water if required.

This will take a few hours. When the meat is falling off the bones use a slotted scoop and remove everything you can from the pot but the broth. Add all other ingredients/spices for the recipe you are making & bring back to the rolling boil. When the chicken cools separate the meat from the skin & bones and return the meat to the pot, and any bones you wish. Note: the meat has almost no flavor at this point. All the flavor from the meat and the bones is in the broth. Adjust salt and spices & cook until done. Taste. Salt? Serve.

Hilditch
 
My experience is similar, but different in a few ways. I can easily find different sized chickens (fryers, broilers, roasters) in the grocery store so I'm not sure what "today's chickens" means. I would never boil a chicken for a few hours, but I'm not sure if you meant the whole process would take a few hours or to boil the chicken for a few hours. (A "few" means three to me.) About an hour and a half of boiling depending on the size of the chicken and the chicken easily releases from the bone. Boiling much longer results in chicken mush.
 
Todays chickens for many areas of the country run 4 1/2 to 6 lbs. A low rolling boil, which is close to a simmer, will take about 4 to 6 hours to release the meat from the bones with a good texture. No mush. A faster boil will do it quicker but won’t extract the flavor from the carcass and fat as well. The difference between boils is like between roasting a chicken and barbecuing one low and slow.

Hilditch
 
Did you read the article and watch the video? Common sense doesn't always agree with the facts. Rinsing chicken doesn't actually get it clean, it just splatters bacteria all over your kitchen.
 

If my mother and grandma were still alive they would laugh you off the face of this earth. It's junk like this that reminds me each day NOT to go to these sites where as someone is looking for notoriety to get their name out there regardless of what's true or not true.
I use to think CIC had a lot of level headed members with common sense and a will to preserve our past culinary tools and down home proven recipes but I may have to re-thing that issue.
We are free to say pretty much what we like here and agree to disagree at times but I would like you to tell me how you prepare your store bought chicken without washing it???
I for one will wash mine until the skin gets ready to fall off and the Brits can continue to do as they like. Just hope I never have to eat chicken over there.
 
Dave, interesting read. But I've be washing chicken for 30 years, something my mom mentioned to do when I was younger and it kinda stuck. I just try and not make it do a puppet show while its taking a shower in the sink :mrgreen:
 
Drexel University actually has a whole Don't Wash Your Chicken campaign to try to educate people: http://drexel.edu/dontwashyourchicken/. Judging by this discussion, it has not been a very effective campaign. :chuckle:

Here's where the info is coming from. It's not some crackpot fringe theory, it's science: "This material is based on work funded by the National Integrated Food Safety Initiative (NIFSI), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), under Agreement No. 2009-51110-05853. ©2013, NMSU Board of Regents. Drexel University and New Mexico State University cooperating with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Drexel University and NMSU are both equal opportunity/affirmative action employers and educators."

The only thing that actually kills the bacteria on chicken is cooking it.
 
I worked as a clinical microbiologist for 17 years. The information in the Drexel videos is accurate. What I love about CIC is learning from a variety of members’ knowledge and experiences. Also, I loved learning from my grandmother and mother, but sometimes they just relied on tradition, and not on fact or science. While we all hate to hear someone claim, "this is the right and only way" we should be willing to listen to someone presenting information that could radically change the way we do one particular task. So here is the analogy I hope we all can relate to. "I just throw my case iron pan in the coals of a fire to burn off the carbon and it worked for my grandmother and it works for me!" We all know that it works sometimes and it warps or ruins a pan other times. Why risk ruining a pan? The same goes for food preparation. Why risk food poisoning? "I have (or my mother or grandmother) always rinsed my chicken off and I (we) have never had a problem". Yes, many people rinse their chickens and have experienced no problems. Here is a quote from a food safety expert, “Food safety researchers haven't really defined a "safe water speed" for rinsing raw poultry. Any time you introduce water or a rinse, you are disturbing the bacteria on the raw poultry and making it likelier that those buggies will fly off your meat and onto some other kitchen surface — or onto you. "I can't make you not take the risk, " Quinlan says, "but you need to know what you are dealing with." If you rinse your chicken out of safety concerns, just stop, she says, because you are making it less safe. If you are doing it to enhance flavor, that's fine, but use proper precautions.”
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt...ic-your-questions-on-not-washing-raw-chickens. If you want to take the risk and take proper precautions (all other food is out of the food prep area and washing down everything in the splash zone) that is fine, but know what you are dealing with. Suffering with diarrhea, vomiting, and/or stomach issues for 7 to 21 days due to Campylobacter jejuni, or Salmonella is not pleasant. I won’t go into the story here, but one of mine family members will no longer wash out a chicken before cooking.
 
Well, I might stop washing my chicken. What I will not do is low boil a chicken for 6 hours or even 3 hours. It isn't necessary and isn't going to add any more flavor to the stock.
 
Maybe, but why would you still rinse chicken after reading that? What do you think the benefits are?
 
First I don’t believe everything I read, but I do believe there is professional overkill that uses exaggeration and fear to make a statement. When I get a chicken I finish the cleaning process that the processor did not do. I scrape/loosen the blood in the bird, pull off strands of the cavity lining, trim off excess fat and skin, cut off the tail and wing tips and scrape out anything in the cavity with my finger nails that I can.

At this point there are pieces of blood and misc. loose pieces of tissue in and on the bird that I don’t wish to be in the pot. The best way to remove this is to rinse the bird and flush out the cavity. Soap and hot water follows for the sink, shears and me.

Hilditch

---------- Post added at 03:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:42 AM ----------

Dave, I didn’t answer your question. The benefits are having a clean bird to put into the pot and the resulting sweeter tasting dish without miscellaneous bits that look like they need to be strained out of the broth.
 
Grilling 72 chickens for the 4th. About 200 ears of silver queen. Salad and green beans. The chickens are WOGs. Or without gizzards.

I do not wash the birds before seasoning and grill. That's the way I do it.
Folks like my chicken.

---------- Post added at 03:06 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:28 PM ----------

I buy the chickens by the case. Coolers to hold the birds have been cleaned and washed with a bleach and water mix. Birds are seasoned with my chicken spices and bagged. The coolers are iced and the birds will rest for three hours while seasoned. Twenty birds are done on gas and the rest go on a bigger grill. A PDQ big stainless grill with charcoal. The birds go on the grill breast side down.
They keep the moisture that way. Done when the legs pull free.

Fishing tourment from sunlight until noon. Redfish, flounder, and trout will be fried for lunch. Hush puppies, fries, and a jimmy salad for lunch. Chicken dinner at six for a couple of hundred great Americans. Fireworks at dark.

It's a lot of work but I have great helpers.

Happy birthday America.
 
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